Be alerted: the show of the summer, in Chelsea at least, is Bridge Freezes Before Road, curated by Neville Wakefield at Barbara Gladstone. Including over a dozen artists spanning different generations and media, the exhibition takes on the messiness of the creative condition, and the fearlessness with which artists confront it. Hence, the familiar road sign—Bridge Freezes Before Road—that gives the show its title; it stands as both a marker and a cautionary notice of the precariousness ahead.
Roadside warnings, however, rarely stop one from continuing forward, and the exhibition portrays its artists in full throttle. In Slater Bradley's video Year of the Doppelganger, a shirtless Kurt Cobainesque drummer bangs away in a football stadium while team members perform their exercise regimens in a chorus line formation. It's the artist as orchestrator, disrupting disciplined athleticism with rock 'n' roll anarchy, all the while turning a row of burly jocks into something resembling the Rockettes.
Elsewhere, an aluminum dartboard by Clive Barker seems to point to the inevitability of failure, even when you're right on target, while Dan Colen's spray-painted "Holy Shit"—which is mounted upside-down—literally speaks for itself. Meanwhile, road trips reach their most obsessive conclusion in a video by Chris Burden, which chronicles the travels of a trucker in endlessly rambling, mechanical detail. Indeed, throughout the show, acts from the heroic to the mundane become achievements ranging in character from the slapstick to the Herculean, whether expressed through self-deprecation or defiant non-conformism. A sculptural arrangement in concrete by the late Martin Kippenberger, consisting of a dwarf armed with a cannon, might be seen as a Disney version of David and Goliath.
All life is a struggle, the lesson appears to be. Sitting in the driver's seat isn't much different than being the deer caught in the headlights. Yet, far from resignation or acquiescence, the exhibition speaks of a certain fortitude with which uncertainty becomes its own resolution, and the journey continues on.
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Perhaps it's the state of current world affairs. Or maybe it's the timing, coinciding with the Venice Biennale and its carnivalesque—and some might say obsolete—gathering of national pavilions. But We Could Have Invited Everyone, now on view at Andrew Kreps, makes you want to start your own country. After all, everyone in this wily group show already has. Organized by Rob Blackson and gallery artist Peter Coffin, the exhibition is a United Nations of micronations, self-declared states that are largely unrecognized by anyone except the agitators, dreamers and crackpots who have founded them. Both historical and speculative in its approach, the show includes flags, passports, currencies and other assorted ephemera of nationhood, representing dozens of rogue principalities from Jefferson State, which actually tried to secede from California and Oregon in 1941 (though largely as a publicity stunt), to AVL-ville, the four-year-old "free state" run by the artist Joep van Lieshout in the port of Rotterdam. Part documentary project and part utopian fantasy, We Could Have Invited Everyone is also, in some ways, a call to arms: visitors can sign up for citizenship in several of the micronations, as well as learn ways to form their own.
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Fractals are irregular, geometric patterns made of ever smaller versions of the same pattern, a brain-teasing infinity within a finite structure. They've had a growing presence on the creative landscape ever since computers made them easier to generate. And The Jeweleigha Set, a group show at Greene Naftali, gives a snapshot of how artists are looking to fractals, if not in form, then in theory. Ara Peterson's Kaleidoscope Feedback is a video of dizzying patterns created by the feedback loop between a camera and projection screen, while his sculptural work, Standing Waves (pictured left), represents the vacillations of a wave animation, frame by frame, in brightly-painted plywood. What is momentary and temporal is translated into another dimension to become something more than itself. Similarly, in a series of photographs, Rachel Harrison has taken a postcard of a sunset and distorted it to bring out its hidden properties, while Keith Connolly's mirrored diamond is accompanied by a video in which it becomes submerged by the tide—a natural manifestation of fractals—at Brighton Beach. The association between mathematical geometries and cosmic meaning—a search for the patterns of being and existence—dates further back than Stonehenge, and The Jeweleigh Set skillfully brings it out in the most unexpected of ways.
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Shoptart
You might think, given his collaboration with leather-goods house Schott, that Jeremy Scott is going butch. After all, Schott created the biker jackets worn by Marlon Brando and James Dean. But no, that manly legacy is given a swishy twist, like this rococo tea print of treasure trolls in pastoral repose. Also this month: Marni, Stella McCartney, Tom Binns and more.  Hint Shop
If Rad Hourani were writing this blurb, it would be over already. That's because, for the soon-to-explode French-Canadian designer, it's all about extreme minimalism. Thus, the concept behind this one-size-fits-all, unisex, sleeveless T-shirt—printed with the dates and times of a calendar—is that it can be worn by anyone, anytime. Message Boards
"Madonna starves herself on a raw macrobiotic kosher vegan kaballah diet and works out three hours a day to maintain the physique of a 12-year-old gymnast boy, and then has the cheeks of a 300-pound woman implanted into her face. And her forehead is like a plastic baby's bottom. It's like Nicole Kidman's forehead at the height of her botox addiction, and we all remember how unfortunate that era was." |
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